Category Archives: Buffalo

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — SolarCity Corp.’s solar-panel
factory in upstate New York could allow the solar installer to
reduce its costs and save about $400 million a year, analysts at
Credit Suisse estimate.

SolarCity SCTY, -0.66% and New York struck a deal earlier this week,
with the state announcing a $750 million package to build the
solar-panel factory near Buffalo.

Three times as many millios of dollars invested as expected, 3,000 jobs, and
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo says “they could have gone anywhere on the planet”.
They could have come here.
They went to snowy Buffalo.

An Economic Development Council in snowy Buffalo has
landed a solar manufacturer with suddenly even deeper pockets,
while our Industrial Authority didn’t even meet this month.
Maybe instead of supporting an unnecessary fracked methane
pipeline that diverts resources we could get on with
real solar industry here in sunny south Georgia?

It’s upstream of much of the U.S.
side of the Great Lakes, and you can participate in the hearing
without having to go to Canada.
It may be a thousand miles from here, but stop one there and
maybe stop one here.
You wouldn’t want a nuclear waste dump on the Altamaha or Savannah River,
would you?

Surely the question that comes to many is why on Earth would anyone
in their right mind consider the shores of Lake Huron for the first
permanent nuclear dump in North America? Lake Huron sits to the
north of Lakes St. Clair, Erie and Ontario and the water of this
lake flows southward and eastward, eventually connecting to the
Atlantic Ocean through the St. Lawrence Seaway.

FedEx Trade Networks began construction Tuesday on its new
distribution center in the Town of Tonawanda, giving hope to local
development officials that the company’s expansion will boost the
Buffalo Niagara region’s efforts to become a distribution and
logistics hub.

“It really drives home the value of this region as a center
for logistics in the global economy,” said Kenneth Adams,
president and chief executive officer of Empire State Development,
the state’s main economic development agency.

“It plays to the inherent strength of the region,” Adams
said. “There could be no better seal of approval for a
logistics business in this location.”

We’ve got transportation and logistics and distribution centers here,
but we don’t have this:

Fred Schardt, president of FedEx Trade Networks, said the
environmental benefits of the company’s 14-acre site within the
Riverview Solar Technology Park off River Road also were a selling
point. “We understand the importance of doing business in an
environmentally sustainable way. It’s very, very important for
us,” he said. “This park allows this to happen.”

The FedEx building will include a 100-kilowatt solar array that will
be integrated into the design of the structure. Those solar panels
are expected to generate 1 million kilowatt-hours of electricity
during the term of the company’s lease, reducing the company’s
consumption of fossil fuels by the equivalent of 80,000 gallons of
gasoline, Montante said.

If Buffalo, a thousand miles to the north with much less sun,
can do this, we can, too.
Maybe if we did this, maybe in some of VLCIA’s industrial parks,
maybe it would attract more businesses….

University at Buffalo Geology Professor Dr. Marcus Bursik says there
are two types of sinkholes. One type is caused by aging
infrastructure, like old pipes that burst underground and eventually
cause a collapse on the surface. This is more common and is
sometimes called a “fake sinkhole.”

From Austin to Buffalo, fake science for fracking is increasingly being exposed,
with academic consequences: lead professor resigns,
institute head quits, another institute disbanded.
The image on the right (Frack U) is not a reputation any university wants to see.
At least academia takes conflicts of interest seriously;
now if government and the voters would do the same….
Or energy companies.
Remember, shale gas (plus nuclear) is what Georgia Power and
Southern Company are shifting to from coal,
while shading us from the finances that would enable solar power
for jobs and energy independence in south Georgia.

The original report by UT Austin’s Energy Institute,
‘Fact-Based Regulation for Environmental Protection in the Shale Gas
Development,’
was released early this year, and claimed that there
was no link between fracking and water contamination. But this
summer, the
Public Accountability Initiative, a watchdog group,
reported that the head of the study, UT professor Chip Groat, had
been sitting on the board of a drilling company the entire time. His
compensation totaled over $1.5 million over the last five years.
That prompted the University to announce an independent review of
the study a month later, which was released today.

The review finds many problems with the original study, chief among
them that Groat did not disclose what it calls a “clear
conflict of interest,” which “severely diminished”
the study. The study was originally commissioned as a way to correct
what it called “controversies” over fracking because of
media reports, but ironically ended up as a lightning rod itself for
failing to disclose conflicts of interest and for lacking scientific
rigor.

Over the summer, crews at Rutgers University's Livingston Campus
began transforming a 32-acre, 3,500-spot parking lot into one of the
largest solar canopy arrays in the nation. The array will have a
capacity of 8 megawatts, enough to power 1,000 homes.

The canopy is more than just eco window dressing — Antonio
Calcado, Rutgers vice president for facilities and capital planning,
expects that with the financing structure, grants and energy
credits, the investment will return about $28 million to the
university over the next 20 years. A previous solar project had a
similarly rapid payback.

“Combined with the electricity we produce, it's a winner all
around,” says Calcado. “We're an institution of higher
learning—we teach this stuff—so we should also lead by
example. It's a living laboratory in many respects.”

Lead by example: now there's an idea!
An idea that might even attract businesses.